[ColorForth] USB and other serial bit boffing

["Kurt B. Kaiser" <kbk@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jeff Fox wrote:
> > I can't imagine making the
> > effort to interface colorForth to the CardBus
> > (where there are things like a 5
> > GB hard drive on a PC card  $$$).
> 
> 5GB on a PC card today? Wow. I remember all those
> years when I looked forward to adding a floppy
> drive to the machine someday. ;-)

The trick for us is to get something inexpensive which will store
a few megs.

A 16MB CompactFlash Card is $22, and a ZIO! USB reader/writer is $30.

If you want more than about 150MB of removable storage, disk is much cheaper,
though you can expect the price point to move.

Iomega Peerless is a 20GB USB drive for about $325. Extra 20GB and 10GB disks
(each with its own heads!) are available. 10GB runs about $130. This also makes
a pretty good backup solution for a PC.

The problem with these is it is not possible to boot from the USB device, as
far as I know. Without a floppy, I suppose you only have the HD or the CD/DVD
to boot from. I imagine you could burn a CD with a core colorForth image and
USB drivers. When booted, it would use the USB to load the working image from
CompactFlash.

I don't know if the latest BIOSs will boot from USB or Firewire. I suspect
things are headed in that direction; I wonder what the PC98 spec says about
that?

The nice thing is all this USB code, if written in colorForth, can be quickly
transferred to the real hardware, when it arrives =) 

I imagine that flash is a good choice for removable storage on a cheap Internet
(or whatever) box. A couple of MB should be pretty cheap bought in quantity.
It's rugged, and the reader/writer "mechanism" is also very inexpensive.

Regards, KBK
-- 
   K u r t    B.   K a i s e r
   k b k @@ s h o r e .. n e t
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